Inspiration in the Shower

After a long hiatus, I’m back. Don’t know how often I will be able to pontificate thusly, but I will try to do better this year. Call it a new year’s resolution. No don’t, that will jinx it.
This morning I was taking a shower and noticed for the second time in two days a strange background noise over the shower. I stopped for a moment to listen carefully and it seemed like some sort of really low frequency pulsation. Like yesterday, I passed it off as either the city trash truck idling on the street outside, or the periodic noise from the oil refinery about a mile away towards the harbor.
However, today when I turned off the shower and opened the door to grab a towel, I noticed that the noise almost went away. Curious. I shut the door again and it came back. The strange thing is not that my shower acts as a sort of acoustic amplifier for these strong low frequency sounds, but that this is the first time I have identified it. You see, I have lived in this house for 25 years.
Does this mean that my powers of perception have increased dramatically? That my mental acuity has actually improved over the last 25 years? Most people I know seem to be going the other direction. Perhaps my mental growth just makes it seem like all of them are getting more scatterbrained. That must be it. Ok, let’s move on.
The topic today is my ongoing frustration with by my AV system. My wife got me a DVD recorder for Christmas so I can transfer to disk all my aging family video tapes. Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that I transferred my old 8 and 16 mm film movies to tape. In any case, the challenge of hooking up the DVD player/recorder to my system was formidable.
The problem is that my receiver is only designed to select among various inputs, not among outputs. The hang-up is when you have these on-screen menus that you need to access. If I want to select my satellite box as the source, I can’t see the on-screen menus from the DVD recorder to operate the record functions if it is hooked to the amp like a typical video source. I came up with a solution but I had to compromise some functionality and it is totally non-intuitive for the rest of the family. If my system was even slightly smart, I could configure it according to what I want to do. Then I just choose “Record DVD from Satellite” and the little computer in the receiver would do all the routing for you.
The other big payoff is that non-technical people in my house (basically everyone else) could watch a movie or record a DVD with ease, leaving me at peace.
It’s time the big AV manufacturers starting putting some money into the brains of their equipment instead of just the brawn. Who really needs a thousand watts in their family room anyway? I also look forward to the day when all you need to do is to plug a single small fiberoptic cable from each unit to the receiver/controller. Then you can press one button and the brain polls each unit, configures everything, names the sources and destinations, all automatically. No more morass of wires, no more engineering degree required to hook up your system.
If they’re putting microprocessors in running shoes, it’s high time that AV systems got some brains. Truth is, I don’t trust my growing mental powers to be able to keep up with the rate of change in complexity I’m having to deal with.